I'm perfectly happy with the terminology, setup, and analysis. I studied physics in my bachelor's, complex systems in my master's, and have been ingesting philosophy at a leisurely rate all the while and have been working with concepts like this long enough that I can see this paper fits comfortably into the existing body of work.
I don't know what your background is but I think it's a reasonable framework for studying the connections between micro- and macro-scale dynamics. I'm not speaking to the usefulness of the approach, but it's certainly a valid contribution to the science. I'm sure the vast majority of researchers at SFI would agree (I'm not affiliated with SFI).
If it helps, one of the papers[1] that cited this one has a bit more of a concrete application of this line of thinking. You will also note that TFA is published by NIH and [1] by APS. I'm sorry you feel it's a crackpot paper but I'd call it hubris to dismiss something you clearly have little familiarity with out of hand.
You are most certainly correct that I have too little familiarity with the field.
Rereading my comment I see that I accuse the author of being a crackpot, which was not my intention. I merely wanted to point out that opaqueness is more often an indicator of being uninteresting rather than genius. Given the limited amount of time we have, I'd rather err on the side of missing out on a breakthrough.
What is more likely, is that this paper is neither of the extremes, but my comment did not allow for that position. And even more likely, as you point out, is that I experience opaqueness because I lack knowledge to understand most of it.
I still don't like the long and complex sentences though :)
I don't know what your background is but I think it's a reasonable framework for studying the connections between micro- and macro-scale dynamics. I'm not speaking to the usefulness of the approach, but it's certainly a valid contribution to the science. I'm sure the vast majority of researchers at SFI would agree (I'm not affiliated with SFI).
If it helps, one of the papers[1] that cited this one has a bit more of a concrete application of this line of thinking. You will also note that TFA is published by NIH and [1] by APS. I'm sorry you feel it's a crackpot paper but I'd call it hubris to dismiss something you clearly have little familiarity with out of hand.
[1] https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.100.0...